The use of infant care products such as pacifiers, or orthodontic exercisers, and baby bottles to help infants fall asleep and to soothe them during periods of restless sleep has become very common. Almost equally common is the problem of locating those products in and around the infant's bed after the infant has fallen asleep, without lighting the room and taking the risk of awakening the infant. Other difficulties encountered by parents and other infant caregivers arise from the need to check the position of a sleeping infant from time to time without lighting the room and awakening the infant, and to determine whether a sleeping infant is adequately covered for warmth without lighting the room and awakening the infant.
The infant care articles mentioned above, such as pacifiers, bottles and nipples, nipple retainer rings, and nipple covers, are well known, but none of those known articles provide any means of visibility in a darkened room, and it has been necessary to either light the room in which those articles are to located or to use a focused beam of light such as produced by a small flashlight in order to locate those items by sight. No known attempt has been made to aleviate this problem by adapting those articles to be light emitting, for example, though various uses of light emitting items are known in the art for different purposes. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,433,364 to Noble discloses a lighted handgrip, using a battery powered light bulb; U.S. Pat. No. 4,563,726 to Newcomb et.al. discloses a chemiluminescent drinking mug and U.S. Pat. No. 4,086,723 to Strawick discloses a chemiluminescent flying saucer toy, both using a chemiluminescent "light stick"; U.S. Pat. No. 4,413,588 to Lindholm discloses an animal restraint collar which may be made reflective or fluorescent; and U.S. Pat. No. 1,438,839 discloses an easily removeable luminous indicating button for keys. The use of reflective clothing or clothing patches for adults and older children is also known, intended primarily to make the wearer readily visible in vehicle headlights for safety purposes.
All of the approaches to light emission disclosed by the noted prior art are unsuitable for use with articles intended for infants, for various reasons. The use of an electrically powered light bulb has inherent safety risks, as well as problems with weight and bulk. Chemiluminescent "light sticks" and the like, which emit light during the progress of a chemical reaction, are single use items which emit light during a relatively short period, especially when the volume of chemical reactants is small. Reflective or fluorescent materials emit only in the presence of impinging light energy.
Thus there has remained an unfilled gap in the art, relating to the provision of safe, effective, long lasting infant care articles which are adapted to emit a "soft" or low level, unobtrusive light for an extended period of time without the use of bulbs and power sources, and without dependence upon ongoing chemical reactions or upon continued impingement of excitation energy for such emission.